Prime Minister Tony Abbott said this week the CEFC should not invest in established technologies that can easily attract private funding.

"As long as it exists, it might as well be as useful as possible and … invest in new and emerging technologies, the things that might not otherwise get finance," he said.

That view apparently contradicts comments by Mr Robb in 2011 when the Coalition was in opposition. He said the fund proposed by Labor would be spent on "all sorts of wild and wacky proposals that the banks would not touch in a fit".

"This fund will be a honeypot to every white-shoe salesman imaginable," he added.

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The solar industry has been left fuming by a letter to the CEFC by Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in which they direct investments in household and small-scale solar to be "excluded" from the $10 billion fund in future.

The draft investment mandate calls for "mature and established clean energy technologies … to be excluded from the corporation's activities, including extant wind technology and household and small-scale solar".